The person doing the talking was former president Jimmy Carter, who’s making the rounds to plug his new book, “A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence and Power.” (Video after the jump)

Any conservative saying what Carter said, which was profoundly disturbing, would be immediately condemned by the left as an extremist —

LETTERMAN: Things are contained in this book that I was completely ignorant about and am stunned by what I know of what is covered here. What, what is the source of this, the abuse of women, essential slavery, human trafficking, on and on?

CARTER: Well, it’s the worst human rights abuse on earth and it’s basically unaddressed. I’ll start with the worst statistic that I know and that is that 160 million girls are now missing from the face of the earth because they were murdered at birth by their parents or either selectively aborted when their parents find out that the fetus is a girl. So that many people are missing and they’re all girls who are missing.

LETTERMAN: And how many countries are represented in this?

CARTER: A good many countries are. I don’t know how many parents in America would rather have a boy than a girl, that they’re very poor and feel they can’t support children. But in about 15 years ago there was an accurate assessment in China and 50 million were already missing there because the Chinese government had mandated one-is-best, two-is-most (limiting family size), and then India has had the same problem with them, and in many other countries as well. So now, for instance in China and India and South Korea and some other countries, young men can’t find brides to marry, so they buy brides and that increases the amount of slavery that exists on earth.

The slave trade now is much greater (“greater”? How about “worse”?) than it ever was in the 19th century. It amounts to about $32 billion a year and the United States State Department is required by law now to assess the slavery market and they estimate that 800,000 slaves are sold across international borders every year. And 80 percent of those slaves sold are young girls who are going, who are being sold into the sex slave, slavery. And this occurs, about 100,000 of them are in the United States, not sold across international borders. Atlanta is a key of the human trafficking or slavery trade.

During his “Morning Joe” appearance on Monday, Carter went even further, stating that the 160 million “missing” girls murdered through infanticide and sex-selection abortion far exceeds the death toll of the Holocaust — more fighting words to liberals had they come from a conservative.

Letterman, predictably, kept his questions limited to slavery and human trafficking and never revisited Carter’s claim that sex-selection abortion contributes to the enormity of this current-day holocaust — despite Letterman specifically asking about “the source” of this terrible abuse. At the very least, sex-selection abortion must be seen as one of the sources.

Then again, how could Letterman ask about this, since doing so risks derailing a dominant liberal meme, that of the so-called war on women. What Jimmy Carter is describing is an actual war on women and girls, the real thing, global in scope and incomprehensible in its staggering losses. What liberals call the war on women is a phony war, one they allege is raging whenever a conservative questions the Solomonic wisdom of mandating “free” contraception.

In yet another example of its affinity for the obscene, the left would rather wage their phony war than an actual one worth fighting; hence their opposition to efforts in Congress to ban sex-selection abortions.

For Carter to describe all these girls as “missing,” however, is a curious euphemism since the word implies that a person whose whereabouts aren’t known might be alive. Such is not the case after abortion and murder, both of which are rendered with unforgiving finality.

Here’s where I part company on this with the former president: those tens of millions of unborn boys who’ve been aborted — they’re among the missing, too.

LifeNews Note: Jack Coleman is a recovering former liberal journalist from Massachusetts. This originally appeared at Newsbusters.